Contents

Life

Jung Young Moon was born in 1965 in Korea. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in psychology. His literary debut was in 1997 with the novel A Man Who Barely Exists. Jung is also an accomplished translator who has translated more than forty books from English into Korean.[1] In 1999 he won the 12th Dongseo Literary Award with his collection of short stories, A Chain of Dark Tales. [2] In 2003 the Korean National Theater produced his play The Donkeys. In 2005 Jung was invited to participate in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and in 2010 the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Korea Study invited him to participate in a three month long residency program [3]

Work

Jung’s debut, the novel A Man who Barely Exists was published in Jakga Segye (Writer’s World) in 1996, and as a novel two years later. The novel portrays a man mired in ennui, in which state he contemplates the meaning of life.[4] Following this he released collections and novels including Black Chain Stories (1998), Pale Soliloquy (2000), Yawn (2006) and, most recently, A World of Artificiality (2012). Black Chain Stories (A Chain of Dark Tales, in English publication) is a collection of Kafkaesque short stories (some extremely short), which delve into the question of what being means, and what the loss of being means. [5] Jung’s writing is described as avant-garde and often compared to European avant-gardeists, including Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. Jung won the 1999 Dongseo Literary Award for Black Chain Stories, which was translated into French in 2007 and English in 2010.

Jung’s story A Way of Remembrance was included in the short story collection Some Afternoon of a Faun.